The country's gun regulator has issued a stunning rebuke against a firearms lobby group, following claims of police bullying and standover tactics.
By Penny Smith of RNZ
The Justice Select Committee has recommended that the Arms Bill be passed.
The Firearms Safety Authority said it was likely a new, independent regulator - Firearms Safety and Education New Zealand - would be operating from September.
The organisation would be "hosted" by New Zealand Police, which meant it would provide operational support. However, sworn police officers would no longer be involved in the day-to-day decision making of the new body.
Hugh Devereux-Mack from the Council of Licensed Firearms Owners (COLFO) welcomed that move and said police were not trusted by the group's members.
"Police have had a very rapidly declining trust and confidence with the community they're supposed to be regulating ever since 2019, when they stopped looking at licensed firearms owners as law-abiding people and started viewing us as potential criminals," he said.
"Since then, we've seen standover and bullying tactics from them, licensed firearms owners having their houses raided for non-criminal reasons, and now, rather than a community policing approach, which they used to have, they will now attend our homes armed with pistols by default as a general policy."
Devereux-Mack also claimed police were attempting to exert their influence over lawmakers to make rules more restrictive on law-abiding people.
In response, acting director of the Firearms Safety Authority, Superintendent Bruce Bird, said it worked as a separately branded business unit of the New Zealand Police.
"We have worked hard and in close consultation with the firearms community to deliver effective regulatory services and to build enduring, high-trust relationships," he said.
"I'm extremely proud of what Te Tari Pureke has achieved, and our people come to work every day committed to making New Zealand a safer place."
Bird said the authority usually had open and normally constructive channels of dialogue with the COLFO leadership.
"We are incredibly disappointed to see such an inflammatory position being taken by them here. COLFO, as a lobby organisation, has a membership of less than five percent of New Zealand's 220,000 firearms licence holders," he said.
Birch said that annually COLFO asked its members through a Facebook page to fill in a "non-scientific questionnaire" that "invariably reaches the same conclusion".
" ...That there should be less regulatory oversight of firearms in New Zealand, and that the Police should not be the regulator. We understand this to be the evidential basis of their comments," he said.
Birch said the authority's own surveys demonstrated an increase in trust in the regulator from both licensed gun owners and the wider public.
"Our view is that the overwhelming majority of firearms licence holders in New Zealand are law-abiding. We seek to work with them, to ensure they understand their obligations around the safe storage, transportation and use of firearms - to keep all New Zealanders safe," he said.
"From time to time, a small number of licence holders are identified as no longer being fit and proper to possess a firearms licence. For example, they may have been involved in criminal offending, or domestic violence, or be suffering from a psychological challenge, and it is no longer appropriate that they have access to firearms.
"In these circumstances, we make no apologies for fulfilling our role as the regulator to uplift their licences and their firearms. The wider public of New Zealand would expect nothing less from us."
Gun control advocates question cost and information sharing
Gun control advocates have raised concerns about the cost of establishing the new regulator and whether separating firearms regulation from police could hinder public safety.
Gun Control NZ spokesperson Phillipa Yasbek said the Budget allocated about $45 million for the change, with an additional unspecified contingency for the information technology changes required.
She questioned whether the cost was justified.
"It's expensive for what are relatively superficial changes," she said.
Yasbek also raised concerns that moving firearms regulation away from police could slow the sharing of information between the regulator and frontline officers.
She said intelligence sharing often relied on informal relationships, and those relationships could be weakened by the creation of a separate organisation.
Yasbek said creating a regulator detached from frontline police could increase risks to the public if important information was not passed on effectively.
The Arms Bill would now head back to Parliament for its second reading.
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